In providing personal communication services (PCS) or cellular service, a common system architecture utilizes a traditional telecommunication switching system to provide telecommunication features and billing and utilizes a second telecommunication system to provide the necessary mobility operations with respect to the PCS telephones (also referred to as wireless handsets). The second communication system is interconnected to the traditional communication switching system via individual analog telephone links. The second switching system has a dedicated telephone link for each PCS telephone serviced by the second telecommunication system. In the case of BRI interface and similar proprietary links, each B channel is considered a separate link. By dedicating one telephone link per PCS telephone, the second telecommunication switching system simulates on each of the telephone links the type of telephone with which the traditional communication switching system is programmed to operate. This allows the traditional telecommunication system to provide its normal telecommunication features with no change to the program being executed by the traditional communication switching system. In addition, the traditional telecommunication switching system can provide billing in a routine manner. Another advantage of this architecture is that PCS telephones can be added to an existing traditional telecommunication switching system such as a PBX. This allows the PBX to handle wired and PCS telephones. This is advantageous for many customers who have an existing PBX or who are purchasing a new PBX which must handle both wired and wireless telephones.
This system architecture does suffer from one major problem. This problem is that there are a large number of types of PCS telephones that are made by a number of different manufacturers. In addition, each manufacturer has different types of PCS telephones that invoke features in different ways. In addition, there are a large number of telephone links. Most manufacturers of PBXs have one or more proprietary digital telephone links. Furthermore, the manner in which features are invoked on an analog link varies with the different manufacturers of PBXs. Also, analog telephone links function differently for different countries. Finally, even on digital links, the features may well be invoked in different manners for the same digital link even for the same type of PBX from the same manufacturer. Prior art systems have resolved this problem by writing a unique software program for each combination of a type of PCS telephone and set of operations for a given telephone link. The resulting software is very costly to program, prone to software errors, and difficult to administer.